Chinese Great Firewall bottlenecks Gmail download speeds

China’s not exactly friendly to the concept of a free and open internet. Google‘s public spats with the Chinese government have been making headlines for almost a year now, after the search giant first accused the Chinese government of hacking into the Gmail accounts of activists, and then of programming their firewall to make it appear that Gmail was having technical issues, even when it was fine.

Now the Chinese government is taking a new tack to stop people within China from using Google’s popular webmail service. According to benchmark tests done by Greatfirewall.biz, the download speed of Gmail in china has dropped to just 34kbps, even while the Chinese government’s officially condoned webmail service QQ mailbox gets an average of 1514kbps. That’s forty five times slower.

You’d think that these numbers would completely end the lie that China isn’t interfering with Gmail access in China, but China has dismissed all of Google’s recent accusations that Gmail services on the mainland are being disrupted. We all know that Google has the pipe to serve up Gmail as fast as they can, so these numbers strongly argue that China is trying to gimp Gmail.

For what end? Fearing a so-called “jasmine revolution,” China’s recently been cracking down on dissidents online. Since most of China’s local webmail providers fully comply with China’s censorship offices, going through Gmail is one of the only dependable ways to write emails criticizing the government without being dragged out of your home in the middle of the night. By making Gmail so slow as to be nearly unusable, though, China’s making that a less appealing option.

Of the western webmail providers, Yahoo still gets decent download speeds of about 267kbps. Of course, Yahoo fully complies with local Chinese laws on censorship, so you can’t spread dissent through their service or they’ll hand you over… but if all you want to do is send your emails quickly within China, it’s your best bet.